Wilmington-Catalina Airline

Wilmington-Catalina Airline, Ltd. (WCA) was a US scheduled airline founded in 1931 by the Wrigley family of chewing gum fame to provide air transportation with amphibious aircraft on the 30-mile flight from Wilmington, California to Santa Catalina Island. In 1941, the name of the company changed to Catalina Air Transport (CAT) in anticipation of changing to land-based aircraft, but it ceased operation in June 1942 as a result of World War II. After the war, United Air Lines provided service to the island under contract to CAT until 1954. In 1955 CAT formally lost its airline certificate and the company dissolved in 1956.

Despite the airline’s modest size, WCA was captured by the 1938 Civil Aeronautics Act and was thus certificated in 1939–1940 as a scheduled airline by the Civil Aeronautics Authority (CAA) on the basis of flying domestic scheduled service prior to the passage of Act (“grandfathering”). This put WCA in the same regulatory category as trunk carriers such as United, American Airlines, Eastern Air Lines and other far larger airlines certificated the same way.